Date/Time
Date(s) - 03/04/2021
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
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As part of its spring 2021 season, WNMU Cultural Affairs in conjunction with WNMU Expressive Arts presents [re] Presenting: Indexical Archive, an artist workshop with Alia Ali.
Virtual Opening Night (open to public): March 4, 7 p.m. Registration required, please register here.
This project consists of an artist lecture, student workshops, and an opening night event featuring work produced during Alia Ali’s workshop, by WNMU students and faculty. The public is invited to this virtual exhibition to examine the objects and listen to the stories of the participants on WNMU’s website. Viewers are encouraged to explore the sound recordings and embrace the notion of oral history and storytelling, while maintaining a critical eye on those who create our narratives and archives.
Alia Ali is a Yemeni-Bosnian-US multi-media artist. Having traveled to sixty-seven countries, lived in and between seven, and grown up among five languages, her most comfortable mode of communication is through photography, video, and installation. Her travels have led her to process the world through interactive experiences and the belief that the damage of translation and interpretation of written language has dis-served particular communities, resulting in the threat of their exclusion, rather than a means of understanding.
In Alia’s artist talk on February 25, (available here) she discussed her work and how it reflects on the politics of contested notions of linguistics, identity, borders, universality, colonization, mental/physical confinement, and the inherent dualism that exists in each of them. She will then introduce her project, (re)Presenting: an Indexical Archive of Silver City, which is part of the Journey of the Storyteller- Notion of Place workshop series. In Alia’s project, students from across disciplines at WNMU, collectively, will be rethinking archives in terms of how objects (mis)represent the communities that they come from. The idea behind the workshop is anchored in the notion that marginalized communities have been excluded from the dominant historical and cultural archives.